Attack of the Mouthbreathers

I know how much you must miss the lapsednewsguy, but he is anything but lapsed these days. The day job has been busy and will send me on the road for most of this week. I shook things up a bit at the paper recently, but it's too soon to tell if it will do any good.
In my quiet moments, which usually come before 8 a.m. and after 9 p.m., I am almost too bummed out about the general drift of things to put together any post resembling insight. I grew up in Indiana and still don't understand why some working class whites are so upset about having a black president. Make no mistake, my friends; this health care hysteria is shoddy camouflage for racism, plain and simple.
I used to get mad at the attention lavished on mouthbreathers who rant incessantly like spoiled children when they don't get their way (or win elections). Now all of the air time just depresses me. I almost hate living in a country that rewards people for being willfully ignorant.
The solution? Ignore the crybabies and do the right thing. The brilliant James Howard Kunsler make that point in his column this morning:

The most dangerous illusion, of course, is a belief that we can return to a hyped up turbo debt "consumer" economy -- and perhaps the most disappointing thing about Barack Obama, is his incessant cheerleading for a "recovery" to what is already lost and unrecoverable. The man who ran for office on "change" doesn't really have the stomach for it. But, of course, events are in the driver's seat now, not personalities, even charming ones. I'd venture to say that if Mr. Obama thinks he's seen a crisis, and gotten through it, then he ain't seen nothin' yet. We are for sure not returning to the kind of credit orgy that made the last twenty years such a nauseating spectacle -- of which, by the way, the misfeasances and wretched excesses of Wall Street were just one manifestation.
Some theorists out there say that economy follows mood, not vice-versa, and that the anger and sourness on display around the USA, in events like the weekend Washington march, is a clear sign that tectonic shifts in the structures of everyday life are sure to follow. There are too many truly good and intelligent people in this country, to leave our fate to the Palins and the Glen Becks. But the good people had better man up and start telling the truth with some conviction that the truth matters.